What is the greatest joy of writing for you?
Having written. Well, and there's more. While there's a fair amount of time staring at the screen...let me add this -- a favorite cartoon: a guy is sitting in the next room, staring at his typewriter, even as his wife stands, hands on hips, staring at the guy, and he says, "Just because I'm not writing doesn't mean I'm not writing!" It can be that way. Who knows? It could be that the ratio of thinking about what to say to actually putting words on the screen is on the order of six or seven to one. Could be. But the reward -- or "joy" if you insist -- is a couple of paragraphs that really sing, to the point where you say, "Wow! Did I just write that?!'
What are you working on next?
Now into final edit: "Jumping the Border," a story of a draft age (remember what that's all about?) guy who decides to bail to Canada at the height of the Vietnam war, then urges his girlfriend to join him in Montreal. Lots of complications, of course, including an especially nutso nemesis who follows our hero and manages to find and greet him with a bullet. "Jump" may have found exactly the right timing, given that Ken Burns will be releasing his new series on Vietnam this fall. I'm hardly advocating draft evasion or taking sides; rather its simply a look at what it might have been like for the more than 100,000 expats who landed north of the border -- and elsewhere -- during the adventure in southeast Asia. Turns out that a lot of the people liked what they saw and stayed.
Read more of this interview.